Michele Bachmann’s political gift is for moving people, not legislation.

In more than a decade in elected office, the Republican congresswoman and former state senator from the Twin Cities exurbs has been instrumental in leading mass movements against state education standards, same-sex marriage and health care reform. But her success in translating such populist energy into legislative action has been limited, supporters concede.

“Her skill is in drawing people into the political scene that may feel a little disengaged,” said longtime Minnesota GOP state Sen. Warren Limmer. “She encourages activity, she generates interest and she gives them a path on how they can get involved in a simple but effective way.”

Bachmann’s first crusade was perhaps her most successful. After years of community activism on education, she ran her 2000 Senate campaign based largely on opposition to state high school graduation standards known as Profile of Learning.

Once in office, Limmer said, she forced the issue in a way many Democrats and moderate Republicans in St. Paul were unaccustomed to, rallying concerned moms and conservative activists to the cause.

She started a “ground attack” of interest among constituents, Limmer said, “and they started to call” lawmakers.

Profile of Learning was repealed in 2003.

Beginning in 2004, Bachmann similarly rallied a segment of Minnesotans in pursuit of a state constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. Although rebuffed procedurally within the Senate, Bachmann attracted thousands of supporters and ultimately developed a mailing list with more than 200,000 names, Limmer said.

Republicans won control of the Minnesota Legislature in 2010 and earlier this year placed a same-sex marriage amendment on the November 2012 ballot. Her early work was critical to that achievement, Limmer said.

In Congress, Bachmann’s legislative successes have been more limited, while the mass movements she leads have grown exponentially larger.

She was a guiding force behind the protest that brought tens of thousands of people to the Capitol in late 2009 to oppose President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. She founded the congressional tea party caucus, tying her to one of the most potent mass movements in recent political history.

But she hasn’t made much law. Bachmann boasts of introducing bills to repeal the new health care law and the Dodd-Frank financial reform package that passed in 2010. Neither has gained traction.

Conservative congressional colleague Steve King, R-Ia., said it would be unfair to judge Bachmann’s political skills based on legislative successes.

“If you want to move a piece of legislation and you’ve got a speaker of the House that comes from the Berkeley wing of the party, you’re not going to move it, and that’s all there is to it,” King said, referring to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who served as speaker from 2007 through 2010. “People need to understand that you can’t keep score on that.”

COMMUNICATION SKILLS

On the campaign trail and on a personal level, Michele Bachmann has an uncommon ability to communicate her message.

“She’s one of the best retail politicians I’ve ever seen,” said Ed Rollins, a 40-year political veteran who’s worked for leaders ranging from Robert Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. “She has a great ability to connect with people.”

Bachmann’s stump speeches can be warm, replete with witty asides and knowing references that leave her mostly conservative audiences cheering. Her speeches also can be fiery, full of pointed criticism and confident assertions that prompt crowds to groan at the injustices she pledges to correct as president.

For Republican audiences across Iowa, it all adds up to authenticity.

“She’s just so straightforward,” Council Bluffs resident Lynda Fontaine said after an event there. “She doesn’t hem-haw and goof around.”

However, Bachmann’s efforts to connect often prompt her to stretch the facts. In speeches across Iowa over the past two months, Bachmann has increasingly misrepresented the story of a Rock Rapids doctor that she says illustrates the perils of the federal health care law.

In nearly every telling, Bachmann has described the doctor as a “primary care physician” who was forced to hold on a telephone call with the Internal Revenue Service for more than two hours before he could see a “lovely lady” who was insured through Medicare. While he was stuck on the phone, Bachmann has said, other patients and staff were left waiting.

When she told the story at Drake University on Nov. 17, she said the doctor was even “thinking about quitting” his profession out of frustration with the health care law.

Her evolving versions of the story are far different from what the doctor told The Des Moines Register.

Cody Hoefert, a chiropractor who operates Lyon County Chiropractic, described the two-hour-and-15-minute IRS phone call to Bachmann during a campaign stop, but recalled saying nothing specifically about the new health care law.

The phone call was not connected with a specific patient or with requirements related to the law, he said. Instead, it was to verify his office’s address change. He also said he made the call after he was done seeing patients for the day. No patients or staff were inconvenienced.

“What it did is it took two hours and 15 minutes away from my family,” Hoefert said.

POLICY VISION

Michele Bachmann’s policy vision is clear, consistent and convicted: a small-government conservative, a fiscal hawk and a values candidate.

Such constancy endears her to sympathetic voters, but it also indicates rigidity — and an aversion to the compromise necessary for progress in government, others said.

“I have not seen her as a person who tries to bring different sides of an issue together to come to compromise,” said U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat whose district borders Bachmann’s. “She is very much a person who has her view of the world and her view of the direction the United States should be going toward.”

McCollum pointed to a local example: efforts by the state’s congressional delegation to replace the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007, killing 13 people. The tragedy unified Minnesota’s Republican and Democratic lawmakers to secure federal funding to rebuild the bridge, she said, until Bachmann stepped in with a plan to offset the cost with spending cuts elsewhere in government. That opened a partisan divide.

Bachmann’s policy vision is rooted in her evangelical Christian faith. She sometimes refers to her “life verse” — the Bible verse 2 Corinthians 3:17, which she says has guided her throughout her adult life. In her interpretation, the verse explicitly links Christian faith to the American democratic conception of liberty: “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

“This is not an act for her,” McCollum said. “She’s very authentic, and so people who are like-minded are very attracted to her because they see the sincerity from which she speaks. But for a lot of Americans, it’s very radical and it’s very frightening.”

DECISION-MAKING STYLE

Michele Bachmann voraciously pursues information with which to make a decision, but ultimately relies on faith, those who’ve worked closely with her said.

Both Keith Nahigian, her national campaign manager, and his predescessor, Ed Rollins, pointed to Bachmann’s legal education and her appetite for new information as keys to her decision-making style. She gathers facts, weighs arguments, and then rules. Case closed.

“She’s more than willing to study the issues hard,” Rollins said. “She’s a lot smarter than I thought she was.”

Her decisiveness was evident when the campaign was faced with a major decision earlier this year: whether to participate in the Iowa straw poll in August.

Rollins opposed the idea, arguing it would be expensive and irrelevant to the ultimate outcome of the caucuses, and that rival Tim Pawlenty already had a substantial lead in organizing the state’s GOP activists.

But Bachmann wasn’t having it.

“She felt very strongly that this was what she needed to launch her campaign,” Rollins recalled.

But for all her study, Bachmann’s decisions rely, too, on faith and consultation with a higher power.

Earlier this year, when weighing whether to extend three provisions of the Patriot Act, Bachmann cast a wide net for objective data and expert opinion — but also set aside time to pray on the matter, interim congressional chief of staff Brooke Bialke said.

Prayer also figured prominently into deciding whether to run for president, said her husband, Marcus Bachmann.

“She and I did pray, and we did ask God for a direction,” he said.

MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Those close with Michele Bachmann praise her consultative, executive management skills. Outside her campaign and congressional offices, however, opinions are more critical.

Bachmann sets high expectations and gives clear directives, but also allows her staff the freedom to carry them out, said Brooke Bialke, interim chief of staff for her congressional office.

Bachmann confidant and Iowa U.S. Rep. Steve King describes as an organizational triumph the November 2009 rally she spearheaded in opposition to the health care reform package.

King and Bachmann hatched the idea for a mass rally on a Thursday, hit the airwaves, got the permits and pulled the whole thing off just seven days later, when tens of thousands of protesters marched on Capitol Hill.

Not everyone reflects on her management so glowingly, however. In an op-ed column that ran in the Register in June, Bachmann’s former congressional chief of staff and campaign aide Ron Carey described “stacks of unopened contributions” and said “thousands of communications from citizens waited for an answer.”

“If she is unable, or unwilling, to handle the basic duties of a campaign or congressional office, how could she possibly manage the magnitude of the presidency?” he wrote.

During her five years in Congress, Bachmann has employed seven chiefs of staff.

National campaign manager Keith Nahigian counters that Bachmann has cultivated hard work and deep devotion among her campaign staff. Aides routinely put in 20-hour days and seven-day weeks, he said. One staffer has even delayed her wedding to continue on the campaign.

About Bachmann

AGE: 55

LIVES: Stillwater, Minn.

ELECTIVE OFFICE:

U.S. representative, since 2007

Minnesota state senator, 2001-06

What others say about Bachmann:

POLITICAL WATCHER

“She’s not someone who talks about compromise or bipartisanship. She’s someone who talks about the strength of her convictions and not wavering. I think it’s fair to say for her ‘compromise’ would be a dirty word.”

Kathryn Pearson, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota and former staffer to other members of Congress who has followed Bachmann’s career closely

HER HUSBAND

“It’s her faith that is just a real cement or foundation for Michele’s decision-making.”